Charter internet issue

We've had Charter internet the past 4-5 years and overall the speed/quality has usually been great. But I’ve been getting a lot of choke on a couple servers (say CS:S, TF 2, etc.)…and like a teen with some new disease, I’ve been in the “maybe it will go away” phase for some time now. Hoping Charter was having some issues that they'd clear up. Mainly because I’m not a network guy by any stretch.

Meanwhile, Wifi speed hasn’t really been noticably bad.

So far, I’ve swapped out the router in my office to see if it was the cause…bzzt. Also tried 3-4 different Ethernet cables…bzzzt-bzzzt. Also tried bypassing the office router (have my rig, a DNS-323 and my work laptop in and on at times) going straight from the Ethernet line out of the office wall into my PC's NIC. All to no avail.

I just went to the basement and hooked another PC directly up to the Netgear 3000 Charter router and still got a lot of choke, etc.

I ran a CHarter Speedtest: 11.06Mbs down, 1.70Mbs up, Ping 20ms. I've seen much higher on the download speed prior.

So I’m thinking I either have a wireless router that needs replaced or too many networked items along with a flaky “home network setup” of some sort, maybe due to DTV's usage. I don't think Charter will help resolve the latter...and it was fine for a number of years, up until about 4-6 months ago.

I've definitely got a busy network that includes 3 DirectTV HD DVR’s under the Whole Home setup. Also have five users running about the house at various times with various iPhone/Touches/tablets, etc. We have two hard wired PC’s and a single laptop (Mac). The laptop is primarily wireless but not often on the network. Umm, also one each PS3 and X-Box, of course.

I don’t think this is due to downloading of movies/shows on the DTV boxes, at least I’m pretty sure that’s not generally the issue. I've seen the problem late night when most are asleep and recordings are largely done.

I can get a good ping to a server of choice, say 30-50, but I’ll get choke bouncing all over the place…and of course lots of missed packets. I usually do know when the Mrs. is uploading photos, etc., as my ping will movee north of 100-200. But I don’t have visibility of what devices are using “x” bandwidth at any given time.

Nosing around Charters’ site, says since June of 2012 Charter wants to replace routers as needed as opposed to me buying one and installing on my own?

However, another of their web pages supportively points out they recommend either the Netgear WNDR3800 or 4500 (not sure how dated that might be or not).

The “homerun” lines come into our basement and just about every room was wired with Cat5 10yrs ago...which is why the poor service is really irking me! Charter put the WiFi router in the basement…right there where the cable line comes in.

It’s a two story house and sometimes my daughter’s room doesn’t get WiFi (which is the opposite side of the house and two stories up from the router, so no real surprise there).

So a few questions:

1. Any other thoughts on how to “test” the home network and the “loss” I’m experiencing to figure out what needs corrected?2. Can I buy my own WiFi router and just swap out the old (easy enough venture ala plug/play with Charter service)?3. Any thoughts or experience with the Netgear 3800 or 4500 vs. other? With Netgear’s Genie app, looks like I’d be able to view network activity?4. Can I just place a router in the basement and move the WiFi router into my office on the main floor, so the WiFi service is more readily available throughout the house? Guess I'd need a cable router for that idea...or just use another WiFi modem upstairs?

1. Netalyzr experienced transient difficulties when uploading test results. The most common cause of this problem is poorly designed home network equipment which crashes as a consequence of Netalyzr's bandwidth test.

2. Your ISP's DNS server returns IP addresses even for domain names which should not resolve. Instead of an error, the DNS server returns an address of 69.16.143.25, which does not resolve. You can inspect the resulting HTML content here.

There are several possible explanations for this behavior. The most likely cause is that the ISP is attempting to profit from customer's typos by presenting advertisements in response to bad requests, but it could also be due to an error or misconfiguration in the DNS server.

The big problem with this behavior is that it can potentially break any network application which relies on DNS properly returning an error when a name does not exist.

The following lists your DNS server's behavior in more detail.• www.{random}.com is mapped to 69.16.143.25. • www.{random}.org is mapped to 69.16.143.25. • fubar.{random}.com is correctly reported as an error. • http://www.yahoo.cmo [sic] is mapped to 69.16.143.25. • nxdomain.{random}.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu is correctly reported as an error.

Minor Aberrations –

• Certain TCP protocols are blocked in outbound traffic • None of the server's bandwidth measurement packets arrived at the client • Not all DNS types were correctly processed

2. Your ISP's DNS server returns IP addresses even for domain names which should not resolve. Instead of an error, the DNS server returns an address of 69.16.143.25, which does not resolve. You can inspect the resulting HTML content here.

There are several possible explanations for this behavior. The most likely cause is that the ISP is attempting to profit from customer's typos by presenting advertisements in response to bad requests, but it could also be due to an error or misconfiguration in the DNS server.

The likely cause is correct. Charter has been doing that for quite some time. I stopped using their DNS altogether a while ago. There's plenty of free public DNS servers you can use out there, which might help, but I'm not sure if it's your primary issue.

Quote:

So a few questions:

1. Any other thoughts on how to “test” the home network and the “loss” I’m experiencing to figure out what needs corrected?2. Can I buy my own WiFi router and just swap out the old (easy enough venture ala plug/play with Charter service)?3. Any thoughts or experience with the Netgear 3800 or 4500 vs. other? With Netgear’s Genie app, looks like I’d be able to view network activity?4. Can I just place a router in the basement and move the WiFi router into my office on the main floor, so the WiFi service is more readily available throughout the house? Guess I'd need a cable router for that idea...or just use another WiFi modem upstairs?

1. Disconnect/shut. Down. EVERYTHING, test one device directly wired to that Netgear modem. Start adding more things in and working your way back. 2. See answer 43. Haven't used them, so I can't say. 4. You can either try a new modem/gateway downstairs, or add a wifi router upstairs as a range extender. either/or may be a solution.

If you open a command line (assuming windows), run netstat -n while you are connected to those servers. You'll get the IP address, which you can then ping/tracert to see if there's some latency in between. If your gateway supports it, you might be able to set up QoS to prioritize traffic to those servers.

1. Netalyzr experienced transient difficulties when uploading test results. The most common cause of this problem is poorly designed home network equipment which crashes as a consequence of Netalyzr's bandwidth test.

This is the item that doesn't look good. Now you say they are providing a router, can you bypass this to go straight into their modem?

In these sorts of cases I like to refresh both the modem and router, then if any issues remain have a truck roll to check the cable plant at the premises.

Ok went to investigate the lines/appliances little more. We went from dsl to charter awhile back and it's spaghetti western.

So we have a charter cable coming "in" that is split with one line plugged into to a surfoard modem, which only has a telephone line out to my dist board...not sure what that's about. That modem has one Ethernet port, but when I tried to go from it to the spare PC, I never got a IP assigned (no internet access).

The other split line goes into the wireless router...and out of the wireless router, we have 4 Cat5's plugged into the mainboard, feeding various rooms with service.

So I took the main charter cable, unplugged it from the splitter and plugged it directly into wireless router.

Things just ran a ton better on the server I frequent. Still see some choke but manageable, maybe even correctable...but overall very smooth connection. Of course, kids are in bed, recordings may be done, etc etc.

But now figure it's either the splitter....or that crazy line going to the cable modem which I don't think goes anywhere...into a phone line into the patch board.

That dropped the #1 Major issue noted by Netalyzer but we added a 4th Minor for our efforts:

•Network packet buffering may be excessive: We estimate your uplink as having 6200 ms of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large uploads. With such a buffer, real-time applications such as games or audio chat can work quite poorly when conducting large uploads at the same time.

Also, not sure yet what I turned off in the house by bypassing the modem at this point...but I'm running out of time tonight...back in a day or so hopefully.

Also notice, that on TraceRoute of any of the Foreigh IP addresses from netstat, the 3rd hop is consistently Timed Out. 2nd hop is xe-4-2-0.er2.dfw2.us.above.net, the TIMED OUT each time.

And same Charter Speed Test now comes back: 16.3Mbps down, 3.17Mpbs up and 10ms pingSpeedtest.net came in at 29.3Mbps and 36Mbps d/l's...so definitely I'd say better the way its wired now.

Forgive me if I'm misreading the above. It's dark and early and dark and sleepy and dark 'round here at the moment.

With standard consumer cable service, having that "splitter" there is very bad, if it's just a passive coaxial splitter. You can only have one networking device hanging off that incoming cable connection. The gear at the provider's end wants to assign a WAN (Internet) IP address to one device, and to communicate with one device. With two devices connected there, well ... what is that I don't even ... I'm a bit surprised that it works at all. One will get an address via DHCP, and everything the other one does is ... contentious; interfering.

You need to only ever have the modem's WAN port connected to that coax. You'll have to to the "splitting" on the LAN side of the modem, by wire or wireless, or both.

Passive coaxial cable splitters only work for televisions, DVRs, and so on - "cable-ready" consumption devices, not networking gear that expect an Internet connection there.

Edit:

Quote:

The other split line goes into the wireless router...

What? If that's coax, it's not a router - it's a modem. Did I lose it? Can you drop some mfg. and model numbers in here?

I'm wondering if the DTV tech didn't split the cable line to plug one into into the surfboard modem in order to faciltate a phone line to the network box, so that we had their silly phone line "on" all the time? I can't think of why Charter would need/want a phone line hooked up...and again, nothing else is hooked up to the modem itself and it doesn't seem to have a WAN, just a single Ethernet port (out)...that is not in use.

Okay, the Netgear 3000D is a modem/gateway, not just an Ethernet router; it supports channel bonding and the like, which a vanilla consumer cable modem does not, so it isn't what I was thinking it was. Still, I don't think that you want both it AND the surfboard - a 2nd modem, which IS vanilla, really - connected to the coax, and I think that's the core of the problem. You need to get one modem or the other off that coax, and ditch the splitter if that's all it's used for now.

A splitter is fine to go to ONE modem, and with the other tap going to other types of gear. A typical arrangement is to connect one tap to a modem and the other to a television - that works. Telephony gear, I dunno.

You can use a 2nd modem/router as a switch, using LAN-side Ethernet ports (or wireless) only, with no connection on the WAN port, which is coaxial in this case. But unless you have some special setup with the cable provider, you can't have two modem WAN ports hanging off that coax! You also don't want two routers in the picture unless you're doing unusual stuff.

....You can use a 2nd modem/router as a switch, using LAN-side Ethernet ports (or wireless) only, with no connection on the WAN port, which is coaxial in this case....

Right now, I don't really need another router in the basement where the gateway is. I do have a 5-port switch in the office and don’t think that should cause any issues.

Hopefully I can do away w/ the surfboard modem altogether and that doing so clears up the loss/choke issues. Waiting to hear back from the Mrs. today/tonight to see what I broke (if anything) by doing so…but it may be a couple days before we figure out if anything got borked. 

Overall, after doing that, internet speed was noticeably better last night albeit with limited usage...but I assume some network traffic confusion has been resolved.

I may want to add another wireless on the main floor to help with the whole home wireless access (and back deck even)…assume I need to set that up as a bridge or just plug/play should work from any of the room’s Ethernet jacks?

ColinABQ wrote:

If QoS is a factor, that's a separate issue.

Yeah, I’d like to be able to control/limit some devices max speeds, especially Upload as I think that’s generally where my gaming gets hurt the most. Oh like when somebody decides to uploading 100’s of photos to an online storage site. But I don’t think the 3000D is capable of QoS.

In looking at the WNDR4500, it doesn’t have a coax “in” but an Ethernet WAN port. So I’m not sure it would be compatible with my current setup since I have coax “in”. Guessing I’d have to connect it through a cable modem first?

Choke - Choke is server lag. Choke basically means that your computer is sending your players position, and what he does (shoot, nade, knife) to the server, and its not getting there. Counter Strike Source default is to send your players actions to the server 30 times a second. Choke is caused by two things:

1.Your computer is sending too many packets to the server per second. If you try to send 100 commands to the server per second, and it can only accept 40, you are going to be getting 60 choke. This will make you SUCK, none of your shots will register, and only 40% of the things you try to make your player do will be done. (for solution, see below)2.The server is not able to read all of the information being sent to it. This can be caused by network lag at the server, or CPU lag at the server. The client cannot control this, but can accomodate for it (solution below)

Loss - Loss is lag from outside your computer and usually outside the server. This means that while your commands that are going to the server, they are following a path (sometimes can be 30 networks your commands go thru before they reach the server) and somewhere in that path, the packets dont make it to the next place. Those packets are 'lost' in the bowels of the net. Loss can also come from wireless connections, in which case you can change your wireless channel to fix.. Loss is for the most part out of your control, and could always be the most common situation, your connection just plain sucks.

If choke is "server lag" then you can't fix it with networks...right? So why are you trying? Try a different server.

If you have dropped packets (not uncommon with games, since most use UDP anyway) you can try to fix them on your local network, a common factor of which is saturating your uplink with ACKs (running torrents is a notorious offender). Your traceroutes (and specifically that third hop you keep mentioning) having timeouts or no response doesn't mean that your game packets are being dropped, it means your ICMP packets are. (ping and tracert commonly use ICMP...which some deluded network admins think should be dropped for "security" purposes. There are some UDP versions, but those are typically on UNIXy systems).

That's the interpretation I'd expect, Frennzy, given the definition provided. And I expected the same response. There are in-game settings you can tweak to optimize the in/out and reduce choke. I've done that for the most part.

But I can guarantee you, after umpteen years of playinig CS:S, that there is an issue with my network...and it results directly in wonky play on a relativevly close server within a few hops. That doesn't mean there isn't a bad hop or two in there causing grief. But I've seen enough, over an extended period of time, to have 95% belief that my network needs cured. It's not the only server showing similar issues.

So either my immediate network is to blame for most of this (and much of the above may help explain that) or Charter has an issue immediately outside of my home.

I will also say, I initially debated if this should've been posted here or in Gaming...but again, I'm confident that the amount of Server lag/loss is not related to my in-game settings, so brought it here. Changing my in-game settings does nothing to alleviate the choke I'm seeing in-game. And not many other folks are having issues w/ the server. So I think it's isolated more to me vs. charter or other servers within the chain.

But I can guarantee you, after umpteen years of playinig CS:S, that there is an issue with my network

I'm not disagreeing with you...I was asking you to clarify your terms.

So, back to fixing the network:

Again, ignore those "no response" hops in your tracert...they don't mean what you seem to think they mean. You're going down a rabbit hole with this.

Let's start simple.

First, you have an incoming coax line, which needs to terminate on a cable modem. It appears the Netgear is performing this function. If you don't need the phoneline, disconnect the surfboard for now...it appears to be acting as an ATA.

Quote:

The other split line goes into the wireless router...and out of the wireless router, we have 4 Cat5's plugged into the mainboard, feeding various rooms with service.

So I took the main charter cable, unplugged it from the splitter and plugged it directly into wireless router.

So far, so good.

Quote:

Network packet buffering may be excessive: We estimate your uplink as having 6200 ms of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large uploads. With such a buffer, real-time applications such as games or audio chat can work quite poorly when conducting large uploads at the same time.

I assume you changed DNS providers, and are using something like Google's 8.8.8.8 anycast addresses. The above, however, tells me you have upload issues.

Do you torrent? Do your kids torrent? This will always impact things like gaming unless you explicitly limit the number of connections you will support. Even if you turn it off, you're still going to have your link hammered with requests until your IP changes.

Finally, if you want to replace your current gateway box (the 3000) then you'll need a new modem. Typically your ISP will provide one for you, and you'll pretty much never touch it except to connect it to your own router. I dislike these 'all in one' boxes such as the 3000.

...I assume you changed DNS providers, and are using something like Google's 8.8.8.8 anycast addresses. The above, however, tells me you have upload issues.

Do you torrent? Do your kids torrent?....

Finally, if you want to replace your current gateway box (the 3000) then you'll need a new modem. Typically your ISP will provide one for you, and you'll pretty much never touch it except to connect it to your own router. I dislike these 'all in one' boxes such as the 3000.

Wow don't know squat about changing DNS providers...more info please!

We don't torrent...but they/we do downloand HD movies, etc. via DTV and/or Netflix and this likely comes across the network, not 100% sure. But that's not "all the time" obviously.

Somewhere in your current router/gateway, you'll see an entry for DHCP. Typically, the router will advertise itself as the DNS provider, and it will act as a forwarder for your home clients, forwarding to whatever DNS server it picks up from your ISP. You can change this setting in DHCP to any public DNS server you wish. Typically, google's service is fast and well managed. (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are good choices)

If, for whatever reason, you can't update that setting in the DHCP service, you can still manually over-ride it on your clients. In windows, this would be done under the TCP/IP properties of your network adapter(s).

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So you'd nix my thought of spending for the 4500 eh?

Not at all, I've heard it's a solid box. Just be aware you'll need to have Charter provide you with a standalone modem. (likely one that will also provide you with telephony)

Somewhere in your current router/gateway, you'll see an entry for DHCP. Typically, the router will advertise itself as the DNS provider, and it will act as a forwarder for your home clients, forwarding to whatever DNS server it picks up from your ISP. You can change this setting in DHCP to any public DNS server you wish. Typically, google's service is fast and well managed. (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are good choices)

Sounds like this helps resolve web pages faster and is more secure. That's great...but truly, when Charter service is working normally, web pages resolve within 1-3 seconds or so, so this might pick up a fraction of a second by doing this DNS change?

This allows you to keep your home phone line setup as well as the existing wireless functionality. Unless the Surfboard doesn't support DOCSIS 3, I'm not seeing the downside or the need to buy more hardware.

Edit: Reading the 3000D specs, I see it has analog phone interfaces. Why isn't this unit handling the phone line?

This allows you to keep your home phone line setup as well as the existing wireless functionality. Unless the Surfboard doesn't support DOCSIS 3, I'm not seeing the downside or the need to buy more hardware.

Because the 3000D he has is a cablemodem/switch hybrid. It expects a coax upstream connection...even if the surfboard has an ethernet output, he'd have nothing to plug it into. Plus, we don't really know what that surfboard is configured to do, other than act as an ATA.

Because the 3000D he has is a cablemodem/switch hybrid. It expects a coax upstream connection...even if the surfboard has an ethernet output, he'd have nothing to plug it into. Plus, we don't really know what that surfboard is configured to do, other than act as an ATA.

Gotcha.

Looks like the 3000D does support QoS in some form, or at least the specs do.

It looks to me like the cable guy hacked this job up, trying to get the phone to work. I'd be calling them, asking why their all-in-one isn't doing all-in-one.

Okay, the Netgear 3000D is a modem/gateway, not just an Ethernet router; it supports channel bonding and the like, which a vanilla consumer cable modem does not, so it isn't what I was thinking it was. Still, I don't think that you want both it AND the surfboard - a 2nd modem, which IS vanilla, really - connected to the coax, and I think that's the core of the problem. You need to get one modem or the other off that coax, and ditch the splitter if that's all it's used for now.

A splitter is absolutely fine to have, and it's increasingly common to have a pair of devices - does the OP have triple-play / home phone through Charter? He mentions a wire into the "distribution board" from the Surfboard -- this could be providing phone service?

In my area, it is VERY common to see Time Warner stick a splitter in front of modems, because they recently started charging a modem rental fee. The weird part is that if you have phone through them, they don't charge for the modem running the phoneline(s)... if you ONLY use the modem for phone. If you want to avoid a monthly modem fee, but you have TW phone, you end up HAVING to split a line and put one leg on their phone-modem and the other on whatever you purchase to use for internet access.

There's nothing inherently bad about a splitter with cable modems. Hell, take a look at a cable STB these days -- there is a DOCSIS client in there and that's often how they handle some of the advanced stuff like PPV and on-demand. Yes, every one of your cable boxes is also a "cable modem."

[edit] D'oh, should've read the whole thread before posting, I see that the home phone was already covered.

OP, are you paying Charter extra for "wifi service?" I don't know Charter, but this is another value-add that Time Warner does -- they provide a modem/router combo device that has wifi in it, and it costs $5 more per month. It's great for grandma who "doesn't have a wifi" and has no clue how to set it up. Typically when TW does this, they still drop a second modem for phone because there aren't many modems that have phone + router + wifi. This also happens if you are provisioned on DOCSIS 3 (speed-tier dependent) - TW's voice modems are pretty much all DOCSIS 2, so they can't provide you 30Mbps+ on the same modem that gives you voice, so you get two modems.

I would figure out if you are paying Charter extra for a "wifi-enabled" connection, assuming the Netgear 3000D is owned by them. If so, find out if you can either provide your own modem, or switch down to a cheaper non-router device from them (possibly just plug in to the existing Surfboard?) and then provide your own router/wifi unit.

What speed tier are you paying for here, I don't think I saw that in the thread? If you're on something 30Mbps or higher, that could definitely explain why you have two modems (the Surfboard for voice, and the Netgear for data).

I was wrong!!! Okay. Good to know. I feared what I would call contention between the two. Does that mean manually setting their addresses, or will the provider's DHCP services (and customer account settings/provisioning) handle it, somehow? Device recognition? Tell me it isn't something that a typical customer would do?

So about that 6200ms of buffering-- this means that your cable modem is experiencing significant frame loss. DOCSIS is a reliable L2 transport so it will resend those frames to avoid pushing errors up the stack, but that adds latency, which ends up breaking those higher layers anyway as you are seeing.

Get a truck roll and have them figure out your spaghetti splitter situation. Even if you have to pay it will be worth it.

Push them to go for a nuclear option, pull fresh coax from the pole all the way to your modem if you can. At the very least get them to split off the connection for the modem at the entrance before any other splits.

I rememember when the tech from Charter first came out here and I said I was seeing some issues w/ the some game servers. So his "solution" was to max out the speed for us. So I guess I'm paying less for more potential bandwidth, but not really getting great service regardless.

I think if I had one of you network guys (local) come out to troubleshoot for a couple hundred, it might be worth both our time/effort...but having Charter come back out and getting a Tier 1 doofus who doesn't know shit...waste of time and money. So for now, I think I'll keep digging around with the situation and seeing if I can't resolve it myself with an assist from Ars.

Was out late tonight but just ran SpeedTest again: 38Mbps Up, 3.18 Down and 12ms ping.

We were already talking about dropping phone service anyway as we don't really use in-house phones but once a week or less...so if this was really a big "fix" to the latency issue during gaming, I think we might be done here.

I've learned a shit load...and glad I asked. I always feel like the dumbass in the back of the classroom on Ars but you guys are, and always have been, such a great resource. Just wish I had raised my hand a lot earlier at this point. But I thought initially I was having PC NIC issues...and or mobo issues last year...we have a lot of lightning here. So I did a complete "same" rebuild...with no fix. Then I got the bug to totally upgrade and still have the network/internet issue. So finally, I'm thinking enough's enough. I've built a killer rig and the only thing not making this thing "fly" in totality is the latency issue.

Ran some CS:S session and still getting some choke. But this was w/ 22-24 players vs only 10 players prior. And still seeing much better/consistent connection than before.

That's the interpretation I'd expect, Frennzy, given the definition provided. And I expected the same response. There are in-game settings you can tweak to optimize the in/out and reduce choke. I've done that for the most part.

Can you confirm what settings you have actually changed? Back in the days of 1.6 I remember having issues like you but it was easily fixed with in-game config..

Some public servers you go on have an AMX plugin that allows the server to automatically change some in-game settings for some horrific reason!

I'll list a few I remember off the top of my head but I don't know if these are specific to 1.6 and will work with source..

I was wrong!!! Okay. Good to know. I feared what I would call contention between the two. Does that mean manually setting their addresses, or will the provider's DHCP services (and customer account settings/provisioning) handle it, somehow? Device recognition? Tell me it isn't something that a typical customer would do?

All cable modems are handled through DOCSIS, which is managed upstream by the cable company on their CMTS ("cable modem termination system"). Short of buggy modems[1] that allow you to push a config from the consumer side (which isn't supposed to happen), there's no way for multiple modems at a house to "conflict" - if the modem hasn't been registered with the provider, it simply won't allow customer equipment to do anything.

[1] Look up the Motorola SB3100 as an example. with specific firmware (buggy), it could be made to take a config from the LAN side of the modem. By setting up your own TFTP server, you could push your own altered config to it and both uncap the speed limits, and in some instances, get free service, depending on the incompetence of your ISP.

The only problem you can run into with splitting and modems is that too many splits leads to signal loss, both upstream and downstream. This is "bad" for both the modem as well as any TVs/DVRs you have. This is why installers used to be trained to do a 2-way split "At the top" for the modem and hang the TVs off the rest of the mess... but it's really not necessary so long as signal and SnR is sufficient.

A week later and issue persists, less the phone line/modem. So finally called Charter. They see, tapping into the modems history, that my connection is very irregular. Sending a tech out on Sunday. Fingers crossed they figure it out.

Yes, two modems in one house is no different to the head end then two modems in two houses next to eachother. They power up, range and get their upstream and downstream channel assignments, send their MAC to the CMTS and the CMTS (if authorized) sends a config down to the modem.

Also you said above that channel bonding isn't standard. It is in DOCSIS 3 modems.